Diana Scarwid

Scarwid's screen debut came in 1977 with the TV movie The Possessed, but her film career opened properly with Louis Malle's Pretty Baby in 1978 — not a bad room to walk into for a first major feature. By 1980, she was appearing in three projects: Honeysuckle Rose, the drama Inside Moves (which earned her that Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress), and Mommie Dearest, where she played the grown-up Christina Crawford opposite Faye Dunaway. Three credits in one year, two of them awards-caliber. That's a hell of an entrance. The early-to-mid 1980s kept her busy across prestige projects that now read like a syllabus for the decade's best American filmmaking. Rumble Fish and Silkwood, both 1983 — one a Francis Ford Coppola art film shot in black and white, the other a Mike Nichols drama about a nuclear whistleblower. Then 1986 brought three more: Psycho III, Heat, and Extremities, the stage adaptation in which she played a woman who turns the tables on her attacker. It's worth noting that Extremities, directed from William Mastrosimone's own screenplay, gave Scarwid the kind of role that actors talk about in interviews for the rest of their lives — claustrophobic, high-stakes, and deeply physical. Her television work ran parallel to all of this and, if anything, showed even more range. The Emmy-nominated Truman (1995) as Bess Truman. Ruby Bridges (1998). Path to War (2002). Guest arcs on shows as tonally different as Starsky & Hutch, The X-Files, and Heroes. Her main-cast role on Wonderfalls — the short-lived but genuinely beloved Bryan Fuller series — gave her a different kind of visibility, and her recurring appearance as Mother Superior on Pushing Daisies (also Fuller) suggests she and that creative world had a real affinity. Her final credited work appears to be Another Happy Day (2011), after which TMDB lists her as retired.